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Danny Kowalski

Staff Writer

Danny works in product somewhere and has done so at several companies you may or may not have heard of. He writes about startups the way a sports fan watches games: with investment, skepticism, and a running commentary nobody asked for. His verdicts are the most likely to age poorly, and he knows it. His most-used mobile app in 2025 was Bonk, which he refuses to explain.


246 features

Parachute

Parachute Wants to Be the FDA for Hospital AI

Hospitals are drowning in AI vendor pitches and terrified of deploying any of them. Parachute gives health systems a governance layer to evaluate, monitor, and audit clinical AI without needing a team of ML engineers on staff.

Halluminate

Halluminate Is Building the Gym Where AI Agents Learn to Do Real Work

Everyone wants to build AI agents that use computers like humans. The problem is you cannot train those agents on production systems without breaking things. Halluminate builds realistic sandbox environments that replicate Salesforce, Slack, and enterprise tools so AI labs can train and benchmark computer use agents safely.

Closera

Closera Thinks AI Can Save Commercial Brokers 35 Hours a Week

Commercial real estate brokers work 60-hour weeks and spend more than half that time on repetitive deal materials. Closera, built by two Stanford CS grads with backgrounds at Google and BCG, automates the grunt work of CRE so brokers can focus on relationships and deals.

Outrove

Outrove's AI Recruiter Joins Your Google Meet Call With a Face, a Voice, and Better Questions Than Most Humans

Recruiting is broken in a specific way: the first interview is almost always a waste of time for everyone involved. Outrove built an AI recruiter with a human-appearing video presence that joins Google Meet and Zoom calls, conducts natural screening interviews, and feeds structured evaluations into your hiring pipeline. Two founders who previously built seven-figure SaaS companies and a UN-recognized robotic doctor think the first 30 minutes of every hiring process should be automated.

Shor

Shor Wants to Kill Deel's Pricing Model with AI Agents and Stablecoins

Deel charges $599 per employee per month for EOR services. Remote charges $599. Rippling is somewhere in that range. Shor is launching at $99 per month for full-time employees and $20 per month for contractors, using AI agents for compliance automation and stablecoins for instant settlement. A Waterloo and UT Austin team thinks the global payroll industry is overcharging by 5x.

Socratix Ai

Socratix AI Is Building the Fraud Analyst That Never Sleeps

Fraud teams at fintechs and banks are drowning in false positive alerts while real fraud slips through. Socratix AI, built by a DoorDash fraud systems veteran and a Cruise infrastructure engineer, deploys autonomous AI analysts that investigate alerts around the clock and actually explain their decisions.

Pleom

Pleom Thinks Business Intelligence Should Just Work, and It Might Be Right

Most BI tools demand weeks of setup, SQL fluency, and a dedicated analyst to get anything useful out of them. Pleom connects your data sources in seconds and generates AI-powered visualizations, workflows, and analytics with zero learning curve. Founded by an 18-year-old Georgia Tech ML grad, it is the anti-Tableau.

Traceroot Ai

TraceRoot Wants AI Agents to Fix Your Production Bugs Before You Wake Up

Production debugging is still mostly manual. An engineer gets paged, opens Datadog, stares at logs, traces the issue across three services, and writes a fix four hours later. TraceRoot built an open-source AI agent that connects to your telemetry, traces the root cause, and drafts the pull request. The SDK has over 10,000 downloads and the founding team fixed 300+ production bugs at Meta and AWS before deciding to automate themselves out of a job.

Imprezia

Imprezia Is Building the Ad Network for AI, and Developers Should Pay Attention

Half of all search volume could shift to AI interfaces by 2028. That is a $1.3 trillion advertising opportunity with no incumbent ad network serving it. Imprezia, built by a former Amazon Ads and Meta Ads engineer, is placing contextual brand integrations inside AI chatbot conversations. One-line SDK. No banner ads. Just relevant brand mentions woven into natural dialogue.

Verne Robotics

Verne Robotics Teaches Robot Arms New Skills in Thirty Minutes

Industrial robots take months to program for new tasks. Verne Robotics uses diffusion models to train bimanual robot arms from thirty minutes of human demonstration. Their first product deploys in four days. A biotech unicorn is already a customer. Two founders from Stanford, Columbia, and the Vision Pro team are building the learning layer that makes robots actually flexible.

Duranium

Duranium Is Reshoring Critical Metals, and the Math Actually Works

Three foreign producers control 97% of global magnesium and 96% of titanium sponge. Duranium is building a reactor in Alameda that recycles its own emissions and claims it can hit Chinese pricing without subsidies. That is a bold claim. The chemistry behind it is surprisingly credible.

Finperks

Finperks Thinks Prepaid Payments Need Plumbing, Not Another App

The founders of viafintech sold their last prepaid company for nine figures. Now they're back in Berlin, building the API layer they wish had existed the first time around. Finperks aggregates 700+ gift card and prepaid brands into a single integration, and they just raised $4 million to prove the plumbing matters more than the storefront.

Mirai Robotics

Mirai Robotics Is Building the Autonomous Operating System for the Ocean

The ocean is the last major physical infrastructure not governed by software. Mirai Robotics, founded by the team behind Blackshape Aircraft, Sketchin, and Talent Garden, just raised $4.2 million to build autonomous surface vessels for defense, surveillance, and maritime patrol. They're doing it from Puglia, not Palo Alto.

Trava

Trava Thinks Importers Are Leaving Billions on the Table

Customs classification is one of those problems that sounds boring until you realize companies are bleeding billions a year getting it wrong. Trava wants to fix that with AI agents that audit entries and automate tariff codes.

Carecycle

careCycle Wants to Fix Medicare's Churn Problem With Voice AI Teams

Half of all Medicare members churn annually because agencies can't keep up with post-enrollment engagement. careCycle deploys multi-agent AI voice teams that handle the entire customer journey, claiming 5x higher conversions and 37% better retention. The numbers are big. The problem is real.